Israeli kids learning fine art of baseball

Hey there, time traveller!This article was published 25/8/2013 (1201 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

NATE Fish is excited. Things are off to a good start at this "Baseball for Beginners" practice, where 11 young Israeli boys are putting on mitts and pulling baseball caps over knitted yarmulkes.

"All right, now we've got everybody in the dugout like a real team!" he yells. Then he turns around to look at the diamond that his players have helped set up, and his voice drops. "Home plate is backwards, guys," he says.

In sports-mad Israel, where basketball and soccer are hugely popular, baseball is still mostly a curiosity for kids like these. Fish, a former minor leaguer who played alongside Yankees third baseman Kevin Youkilis in college, is trying to change that.

On Aug. 1, he became the first paid full-time national director of the Israel Association of Baseball, which is making a major new push to expand the reach of the sport beyond its base of American expats and their children.

"We have to change the identity of baseball in Israel a little bit," Fish said. "We have to make it cool and we have to make it exciting and athletic."

Fish, a youthful 33-year-old third baseman from Shaker Heights, Ohio, fits the part.

In his blog, part travelogue and part absurdist comedy, he styles himself the "King of All Jewish Baseball." He arrives at practice in workout gear and runs around the field like a high school coach, yelling instructions and keeping the kids moving from drill to drill. He wants them active, engaged and, in the brutal summer heat, sweating.

"The misconception is that baseball is slow and that baseball is boring. Baseball is fast," Fish said. "For anyone who thinks baseball is boring, put them in the batter's box and zip a 95 mph fastball past them and see if they're still bored."

Fish's recent clinic, held in this Jewish settlement outside of Jerusalem, showed just how far he has to go. Misthrown balls flew around the unmowed field, whose track is ringed with a concrete barrier that's more health hazard than warning. One boy who thought he'd hit an inside-the-park home run -- thanks to several fielding errors -- celebrated until Fish delivered some bad news: He was out, having missed every base.

The baseball association, the sport's governing body in the Jewish state, estimates there are 1,000 baseball players at most among Israel's almost eight million residents.

Fish's arrival is the third major push to promote baseball in Israel over the past decade. In 2007, a group of American supporters launched the Israel Baseball League, a professional league comprised almost entirely of foreign players that folded after one season. Last year, Israel fielded a team for the World Baseball Classic. The team, managed by former major leaguer Brad Ausmus, was eliminated in a qualifying round.

Fish was involved in both of those efforts, playing for the IBL's Tel Aviv Lightning and last year's World Baseball Classic squad. Earlier this summer, he coached the American junior team in the Maccabiah Games, a sort of Olympics for Jewish athletes held in Israel every four years.

With his American experience and Israeli connections, Fish seems like a perfect fit for the task of growing baseball in Israel. "I believe in the project and I like the people and I think it's a cool opportunity," Fish said. "How often to you get to be in charge of baseball in a country?"

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